Fire and Ice
by brandend
Summary: They can't always risk a fire, and won't tonight so far south in the Gift, but there are other ways to kindle warmth, and this Jon Snow is beginning to learn some.


**I. Fire**

The moon is a skull tonight, bright and bare and peering as the thousand-eyed gods, and it's cold, so cold. They can't always risk a fire, and won't tonight so far south in the Gift, but there are other ways to kindle warmth, and this Jon Snow is beginning to learn some. It's no auspicious night for it, but Jon Snow knows nothing of _that_ , at least, and she cares none now about the thief and the horned lord and the moonmaid, only knows he's stealing into their sleeping skins, and he's flush against her, and he's cradling her breasts. He's sweet despite the mustiness of the furs, despite the staleness of the sweat clamped in his skin, despite the hint of ale on his breath when he leans in to kiss her, pulling at her lip with his teeth just as she likes.

She likes it too when he tugs roughly at the snarls of her hair, when she can slip her fingers beneath his cloak, under his tunic, and graze her nails along his back down to his arse, pulling him closer to her. She can sense her heartbeat in her belly and the pulse of _him_ against her navel, how the breath catches in his throat when she reaches down to rub him there for a time, cupping him hard in her palm, teasing at his stones. She laughs to feel how he strains and writhes and ruts so furiously at her through his clothes, to hear how he groans for her, and asks him if he knows well enough to stick it in yet, or if she's got to teach him any. He grunts something about needing to please her a little first, because that much Jon Snow does know, all things considered, and she laughs again, guiding his hand beneath the hide of her trousers and arching into him again and again so he can feel just how pleased he makes her. He's astride her nearly instantly, with one hand stroking her and the other fumbling at his laces, and her mocking and rutting only seem to arouse him more.

After, when he's spilled in their furs and his skin is all trembled as leaves, he rolls beside her to kiss her. He's chaste for a while, his breath and lips to her temple, to her cheek the way a southron lordling might do, to the tip of her nose, to her mouth, so gentle, but then he's at the arch of her neck, kissing— gods, biting. It's never long before that makes _her_ need _him_ again, before he needs her, and he lowers his head to draw one of her nipples into his mouth, before he has to do it to the other one as well, before he has to kiss her down the plane between her breasts, down her stomach and at her hips, until his mouth finds her heat.

 _Get in me, Jon Snow,_ she tuts when he's sated her just so, her fingers curling at the jut of his jaw, _and do it tender, like a lord does his lady._ She doesn't know how that is particularly, but she reckons he'll do well enough of it, for now he has to kiss _up_ her body too, so reverent-like, so teasing in his way of being slow and keeping his bone aching at the cleft of her legs that it makes her whimper, but soon he settles to sink into her once more, whispering her name with each shove of his hips and hers before quieting some to nip at the hollow where her neck meets her shoulder.

In the haze of her pleasure, and with Jon Snow near to coming, she almost wants to tell him _now_ that if he insists on being careful, he should have been so the time, a number of weeks ago, he'd fucked a spark into her when their torch sputtered out in that cave. She wants to tell him he can stay so sweet in there, that already she can feel him wrenching in the hum of her earth, feel him stilling sound as water beneath the crests of her ribs, but she's silent but for a sigh that escapes her as he's warm and shuddering on her thigh. She carries a son, she hopes, a boy strong as his mother and grey–eyed as his father, with his father's pout of lips and his mother's curl of hair, kissed by fire. Lucky, like her. But there'll be time enough to tell Jon Snow once they've taken Castle Black, once she's sure their son's roots have taken deeper hold in her, and so Jon Snow will know nothing at the moment, and so she rests with her head on his chest, quietly, watching the stars in their reeling of silver.

It's warm beneath their furs now, and he kisses her forehead as he crushes her to him, and he swears that he won't bother her more tonight though she seemed to have liked being bothered, and her legs are wreathed into his, and he's softening between them, and his hands are clenched in her hair, and she brings her lips to his and she can taste herself there in a way she minds none, and all is still now, but, oh, they'd fucked a fire.

* * *

 **II. Ice**

The white sliver of the moon is a dagger over Castle Black, and she knows tonight will be the night she dies. There's a black arrow protruding strangely between her breasts, a crow's arrow, deep enough to have pierced a lung and to send a searing ache all through her, and it's odd, because she hadn't believed she _would_ die, or _could_ die, not here. Not now.

The clamour's fading in the yard, and she slumps against the wall of a tower, watching the torches overhead trembling their light near to nothingness, watching their flickering on Quort's sprawling corpse. Stone Thumbs is dying nearby with a gash to his head, his breath coming in white pants paler than the bloodied snows beneath him, and it occurs to her that she must look the same, the spectres of her own winded breaths rising stark in the night. She hadn't been planning to die. No, she would have lived through the brunt of the coming winter, gone as far south as she could have without Jon Snow, for as long as she could have, but none of that matters now. The only thing that matters is that she needs to see him.

She'd wanted to kill Jon Snow for deserting them, for deserting _her_ , but she finds now that she can't feel angry anymore, and she wonders if it's because she's aware she's dying, or she forgives him, or if she'd known somehow he'd leave, because he was always a crow, and mayhaps had always been a crow. But no, he had to have loved her some. He'd sworn vows to hold no lands, and take no wife, and father no children, but he'd stolen her, and coupled with her nigh on hundreds of times, and he'd been sweet, and there's a knot of sickness coiling in her belly to disprove he'd kept the last of those oaths, the one the bastard in him had wanted so badly to keep. It seems to her that there are some things that Jon Snow will never get to know, and that perhaps it's for the best that Jon Snow will never get to know them.

She just wants to see the pretty crow one more time, though she's got no idea what she would say, or if she could say anything at all with the arrow buried so far in her chest. Might be she'd tell him that, oh, their veins had been fire for a time, and it had been sweet, and not all men would ever get to live so. They had been lucky. _She_ had been lucky, kissed by fire. Might be she'd tell him that they should have stayed in that cave and joined up with Gendel's children, or mayhaps she might have let him take her to Winterfell and show her the glass gardens and the stone kings, and feast her in the Great Hall, and love her beneath the heart tree (would have, if she weren't going to die, and if winter weren't going to come with its great storm of snows, and if he hadn't been a bastard and a crow). Might be she'd tell him that she loved him as she died.

It's not so bad to die this way, because there are much worse ways to go; this is just coldening and sudden and unexpected. She hadn't thought that death would be like this, right now, so slow, shot by a crow, at a castle tower ached at a starring sky so far south, with her only nineteen, with a crow's babe growing inside her, alone. She'd never really thought about how and when and why, only that men could not choose the manner of their deaths, and so it is, and so it will be, and it's not like the world would wheel any different for it. The seasons would turn, lengthy as they came, and things would be just as they had been, if another long night did not come, if the world did not end in ice. Her mother is long since ash, and she had never known her father, whoever he had been, and she doesn't know what's become of Ryk in the skirmish, so most like only Jon Snow would remember her name, remember that she had been at all. Then at least he would know something.

Her ungloved hands are near frozen from the cold, frost blooming on her skin, and she makes to undo the fastening to her furs, because she wants to see herself and know she exists while she can, while she does. It's an effort to do it, and beneath her coat she's ashing like an ember but for the trickle of blood between her breasts. She gapes to see it. She was never this pale, this wasting, this frail. With a gasp that burns and stabs her lungs, she trails her deadened fingers over the curve of a breast that Jon Snow had liked to kiss and bite and squeeze and suck, that would have fed their son who will never draw breath, and she doesn't even feel sombre, because death just _is_ , and she had _been_ , and first she'd _lived_.

There's a tremor to her breathing, and she knows it's coming soon. She can't sleep, not yet, not yet, but she will lie down now. She needs to look up at the stars yet in their reeling of silver, as they had been that night with him half a turn of the moon ago, needs to feel herself leaden in the track of scarlet-speckled snow, her lungs still aching, aching, because it means she's alive for a little longer. _That's all dying is, a going down to earth and soon a fire—_ just as he had been when he'd taken her at the Fist of the First Men, and pressed her hard into the snows, and opened her, so sweet, and there had been the spitting of flame within her, her want and his seed. She wonders idly if the crows will burn her as her own people would. Jon Snow would burn her if he knew, though he'd said moons ago in the Skirling Pass that he wouldn't, he couldn't. But Jon Snow has learnt _some_ things, after all, and that much he knows to do.

She's stirring, realising that her eyes had shut some, that it wouldn't be so bad, no, to stop staving off the coming dark, because she feels it imminent, when she hears a footfall in the snow, sees a crow bend down beside her.

Jon Snow.

She wants to speak to him, but it's all a trembling and a rattling and a sighing as he holds her hand, holds _her_ , and all that comes out besides is if this is a proper castle, and it is, and he assures her she'll see a hundred more, which makes her want to smile because she's never told him how much she would have liked to have seen Winterfell, and he says the maester can see to her, and she can have something for the pain, and it'll take more than an arrow to kill her because she's kissed by fire and lucky, but she's beyond the help of a maester now, but she _is_ lucky because Jon Snow's pretty brooding crow face isn't a bad last sight to see, but she can't find the strength to jape with him about it because she's dying, she's really dying, and even with the ice budding on her skin she feels like fire.

And she tells him with a stinging breath that they should have stayed in that cave, and he remembers it, and she can smile at that although her lips are beginning to still, and he promises they'll go back there, and she remembers it just as well with the pool and the sputtering of the torch and their bodies forging flame in the darkness, but he knows nothing of their little spark extinguishing inside her, and she wants to ask if he'll promise to burn her this time but it doesn't come out any, and he swears she's not going to die, and he knows nothing because she is going to die, because she feels death clouding over her like a fury of snow, though atimes had a fury of Snow been sweet, so sweet, and _oh, you know nothing, Jon Snow_.

* * *

I always appreciate feedback!


End file.
